I’ll take my stories of resistance over blue-eyed chosen ones with special powers.

So. In a world like this it is good to know where you are.

function showWarning() { var x = document.getElementsByClassName("ContentWarning"); for (i = 0; i x.length; i++) { if (x[i].style.display === "none") { x[i].style.display = "block"; } else { x[i].style.display = "none"; } } } CONTENT WARNING: show warningsThis page contains: Racism Sexism/gender discrimination As a writer and reader, I’m always searching for the alternative history of my lineage. I imagine them as fragments in the path I wasn’t guided down, the one which I still could and will walk down. Coming into a relationship with other queer Asian American speculative poets like Margaret Rhee has meant discovering another entry point—a writing and reading which has been there all along and which I was missing.

SFF is my blanket fort. It's not as durable as an escape pod, but it's a reliable source of comfort and it's bigger inside. It's the meeting place of hope and solidarity among those of us dreaming of better futures.

Speculative poetry allowed me to experience a queer, flexible time—one which held my body steady at a time the rest of me was elsewhere dreaming.

Five pairs of simple gemstone stud earrings—one garnet, another jade, yet another sapphire, and so on—which each seem to match perfectly in cut and clarity, but upon the closest inspection reveal themselves to be barely similar at all.

Whatever, the two old authors linked here share the grieved mien of persons who do not simply resemble the job they do: they have become their work. Most of us should be so lucky.

The problem is not hard to articulate. A utopia or dystopia will almost certainly be arbitrary, a strictly arbitrated reality presented in term of advocacy or disavowal; but it is something else to narrate one arbitrarily.

Even though developed several decades apart (The Black Panther appeared in 1966, and Coming to America was released in 1988), and written by people on different spectrums of the United States’ Salad Bowl (The Black Panther was developed by Jewish Americans Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, while Coming to America was created by African American Eddie Murphy), both share similarities that make them an interesting comparison in how fictional Africa is perceived and narrated through the lens of mainstream American media, in both positive and negative ways.

In prior editions of Metagames, I've talked about how games have the artistic potential to put players through entirely different emotional experiences than non-interactive media. This isn't really a review column, but for once, I'd like to break precedent and discuss a single game at length, from multiple angles. This game is proof that the tools all exist already to make layered and powerful narratives native to digital media—artistic works that can scarcely be compared to anything that's come before. That game is Horizon Zero Dawn. This game casts you as Aloy, a young hunter from the matriarchal Nora tribe. The world she lives in is a lush, almost primordial paradise—that humans share with dangerous, animal-like robots of mysterious origin.